The Birth of a Nation (1915)

“But suppose they kick it into someone else’s way and it goes off?” the director asked.

“Look, Mr Griffith. You’re staging a battle, right? You want realism, don’t you? Suppose someone does get hurt a little. Not much. A foot blown off or something. What you want to do is hustle right on down to where he is and get a good big picture of it, and I tell you, sir, it’ll make your picture.”

Griffith, ever concerned for the safety of his cast and crew, thanked Fireworks for his advice, but chose a far safer method: he had Fireworks load packets with sawdust and lampblack, to which he added just a little gunpowder. The effect was just as impressive – and far safer – at a fraction of the cost of Fireworks’ proposed method. Despite Griffith’s precautions, injuries inevitably occurred. Tom Wilson, a former boxer, almost had his hand blown off when he held on to a grenade too long; the adapted bedsheet worn by an extra riding with the Ku Klux Klan became twisted as he thundered along, blinding him. His horse threw him when he collided with an overhanging tree branch. The blow left the rider unconscious, but otherwise unharmed. His name was John Ford, and had he not recovered, we would not have such classics as Stagecoach and Fort Apache.

The climactic ride of the Klansmen posed another unforeseen problem for Griffith. The outbreak of the war in Europe raised expectations of a massive demand for horses, resulting in a shortage of the creatures in the United States. Griffith’s wranglers rounded up so many horses and riders that studios had to suspend production of westerns in Los Angeles. So great was Griffith’s need, he even had them shipped in from Arizona ranches.

Finding riders for them proved to be an even bigger headache. Normally, movie studios required only a few riders, so Griffith had to make up their numbers with less experienced riders. Many men desperate for work exaggerated their proficiency and were a danger to themselves, other riders and cameramen. For one scene, Griffith asked Bitzer to lie in a hole in the dirt road to capture a shot of the horses riding over him. An inexperienced rider dismounted to straighten himself out when the sheet he wore became twisted. His horse, panicked by the other riders thundering past, bolted and ran straight towards Bitzer. Griffith somehow seized the horse’s reins to prevent it from trampling his cameraman.

Griffith shot Walter Long’s pursuit of Mae Marsh at Big Bear Valley, near San Bernardino. The director, the actors and selected crew members set out in a convoy of three cars on the arduous journey. The steep, winding, unpaved road over the mountain slope of the San Gabriel Valley was a challenging pattern of ruts and potholes. Charlie Muth repeatedly stalled the Packard carrying Griffith, Bitzer and Miriam Cooper. Brown would have to jump out and crank the engine, and when it got stuck, he had to push. After a long, gruelling journey, they arrived in San Bernardino, a haven full of tarmacked roads. In the lobby of their hotel, they found their fellow travellers. While Griffith’s party had been negotiating the treacherous sand roads, they, on the advice of a local, had travelled on a paved road near the Santa Fe tracks.

The next day, Griffith’s party once again travelled alone on a wide, bumpy path that had once been a riverbed. Soon, they were ascending canyon walls on a narrow, sloping road that rose and fell like a rollercoaster on its implacable ascent. Winter rains had worn its untended surface, littering it with rocks and bumps as it sloped towards the canyon hundreds of feet below. Not trusting the car’s brakes, they piled rocks in front of its tyres when they stopped to administer roadside repairs to the clutch. To negotiate the narrow hairpin bends, Muth had to reverse and crawl forwards as if squeezing into a narrow parking space. Each time, Bitzer would jump from the car and guide Muth with hand signals to ensure he didn’t reverse right off the side of the canyon wall.

After what seemed an eternity, the Packard found level ground. The travellers made good time through a fragrant pine forest before pulling up outside the Pine Knot Lodge at Big Bear Lake. There, once again, they found their fellow travellers had arrived hours before them. It turned out that the local in San Bernardino who gave Charlie Muth directions had given him the worst route. “Them San Bernardino jokers can’t rest until they get hold of some greenie and then fill him up with all the lies they can lay their tongue to,” the landlord of the Pine Knot Lodge told them. “And then lay back and laugh the rest of their lives on account of all the trouble they put him to.”

When Griffith edited the scenes they had taken at Big Bear Lake, he realised one shot was missing: that of Mae Marsh leaping from the pinnacle to the rocks below. So, Bitzer and Brown returned to the location – taking the easy route this time. Bitzer positioned his camera at the base of the pinnacle while Brown climbed to the peak with a dummy representing Marsh. When Bitzer gave the signal, Brown was to hurl the dummy over the edge. The simple shot almost ended in tragedy, however, when part of the dummy’s costume – a ribbon or belt, Brown wasn’t sure – caught on his arm, almost pulling him over the edge with the dummy. Only with much pinwheeling of his arms was he able to regain his balance.

Griffith paid little regard to the cost of bringing his revolutionary vision to the screen, but the executives in New York were growing concerned about the mounting costs. When expenditure reached $59,000, Harry Aitken informed Griffith that he would receive no more and was to finish the picture immediately. Undeterred, Griffith raised money wherever he could. He borrowed from Bitzer – first $400 to pay the extras for one day (principal actors would have to wait), then a further $600 the following day. Soon, the amount had risen to $7,000, the total of Bitzer and his wife’s savings. Griffith received a further $9,000 from a mysterious benefactor – a woman whose identity he didn’t reveal. William Clune of Clune’s auditorium supplied $15,000. In return, he received stock, the film’s California rights and the promise Griffith would hold its West Coast premiere in a Clune’s theatre. When costumier Robert Goldstein discovered Griffith couldn’t pay his $6,200 bill, he accepted shares in the film as payment. Griffith also lobbied the Los Angeles Herald city room for sponsorship, raising a sum of $250. Even Lillian Gish’s mother offered $300 – although Griffith politely refused her offer, explaining it was too great a risk. Although well-intentioned, he did Mrs Gish no favours. Had he accepted her money, her investment would have earned hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Part 3: Praise and Condemnation

Griffith kept the movie afloat long enough to complete filming in early November 1914. Nobody seems to remember which was the last scene to be captured, only that Griffith virtually disappeared for two months afterward. Entombed in the cutting room with editors Jimmie and Rose Smith, he embarked on the painstaking task of stitching together the 150,000 feet of footage he had shot.

The titles also had to be created. Griffith polished the first drafts provided by Frank Woods, and Karl Brown shot them with a new and tedious method that made them much clearer on screen. At the same time, Griffith worked with composer Joseph Carl Briel on a score for the film. Together, they created a composition that required a 40-piece orchestra and an off-stage orchestra and sound effects. The score drew on a wide number of influences: Dvorak, Greig, Mozart, Schumann, Tchaikovsky and, most of all, Wagner. Nearly every popular Civil War tune also featured, if only for a few bars, as well as other popular songs from the period. Breil also wrote ‘The Perfect Song’, a romantic theme tune for the Little Colonel and Elsie Stoneman. Bizarrely, it would later become the theme tune for the Amos ‘n’ Andy radio comedy show.

The cast and crew were among the first to attend a screening of the complete picture. Lillian Gish remembered everyone sitting in stunned silence when the lights came on. Then they gathered around Griffith to shower him with praise and gratitude for allowing them to be a part of it. Thomas Dixon, upon seeing the film, remarked that “This isn’t my book at all.” He was nevertheless happy for his name to be attached to Griffith’s film – and to accept the 25% share in profits that netted him several million dollars.

The film’s story follows the fortunes of two families – the Northern Stonemans and the Camerons from South Carolina. We first meet them when Austin Stoneman (Ralph Lewis), a pro-abolitionist member of the House of Representatives, and his family pay a visit to the Camerons at their plantation in the fictional town of Piedmont. The Civil War separates the families. The Stoneman brothers join the Union forces, and Ben Cameron (Henry B. Walthall) leads a platoon in the Confederate Army. Wounded in battle, Ben is nursed back to health by Elsie (Lillian Gish), Stoneman’s daughter.

Ben returns home after the war to find his hometown has become the base for Silas Lynch (George Siegmann). He is Stoneman’s mulatto protégé and oversees a rigged election that ensures victory for the blacks and carpetbaggers. Subjected to unjust treatment by the blacks, disaffected whites rally under the banner of the Ku Klux Klan, a new organisation formed by Ben Cameron.

The ultimate cost of making The Birth of a Nation – before printing and advertising – was just over $100,000 – a phenomenal sum for the time. On 1st and 2nd January 1915, Griffith played sneak previews to unsuspecting audiences in Riverside, California.

The film premiered at Clune’s Auditorium in Los Angeles on Monday, 8th February 1915, under its original title of The Clansman, despite legal attempts by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to obtain an injunction against it. They claimed its screening might heighten racial tension and incite riots but succeeded only in prohibiting the afternoon screening. In the evening, crowds swarmed outside, hoping to purchase cancelled tickets. 2,500 people attended the premiere. Usherettes in Civil War era costumes offered them petitions to sign demanding the Los Angeles City Council take no action to prevent the film from being shown.

A tense, expectant hush filled the auditorium when the lights dimmed shortly after 8pm and the film’s title was projected onto the curtain in front of the screen. The curtain rose, and a deafening fanfare from the orchestra pit heralded the start of the film. It began with the intertitle: “The bringing of the African to America planted the first seed of disunion.”

Karl Brown had been unimpressed by the film while shooting it and feared it would disappoint the huge audience. His fears evaporated as he watched the film unfold. He recalled the audience’s reaction to the scene in which the defiant Colonel leads a doomed charge and rams the Confederate standard into the mouth of a Union cannon. “I think every man in that packed audience was on his feet cheering, not the picture, not the orchestra, not Griffith but voicing his exultation at this man’s courage – defiant in defeat, and all alone with only the heavens for his witness.”

The consensus during the intermission was that after such a rousing opening salvo, the second half of the film was sure to be an anticlimax. But the naysayers were wrong. The audience sat entranced throughout. Brown recalled that as the Klansmen started their ride, “The cheers began to rise from all over that packed house. This was not a ride to save Little Sister but to avenge her death, and every soul in that audience was in the saddle with the clansmen and pounding hell-for-leather on an errand of stern justice, lighted on their way by the holy flames of a burning cross.”

Brown also remembered that when the film ended, the audience “didn’t just sit there and applaud, but they stood up and cheered and yelled and stamped feet until Griffith finally made an appearance.” The director emerged from stage left but said nothing; he merely accepted the applause and cheers that washed over him.

On 18th February, President Woodrow Wilson, still officially in mourning for his wife, viewed the film at the White House. He is often attributed with remarking after watching the film that, “It is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.” Whether he ever uttered these words is open to doubt, although as the film’s view aligned with that of the President, it may be true. If not, then it is just one of many legends attached to the movie.

The following evening, it was shown to several U.S. politicians at the Raleigh Hotel in Washington. A further series of screenings occurred between 13th February and 3rd March 1915, during which, according to legend, Dixon suggested to Griffith that he change the film’s title from The Clansman to The Birth of a Nation. All these screenings, held not only for dignitaries but leading literary, drama critics and society figures, were staged to drum up interest in the film’s opening in New York on 3rd March. The makers also launched a massive publicity campaign, most of which promulgated blatant untruths that passed into movie lore. The film’s publicists, Theodore Mitchell and J.R. McCarthy, spuriously claimed the film cost $500,000 and featured a cast of 18,000 people. They also claimed that 3,000 horses were involved.

The Birth of a Nation met with near-universal critical acclaim. It ran at Clune’s for a record-breaking seven months. Even in New York, where tickets were a record-breaking $2.00 per seat, demand was unprecedented. But while its artistic content was beyond reproach, the NAACP rightly seized upon its racist viewpoint as a major cause for concern. The National Board of Censorship, recognising the potential for controversy, decided that its entire body of 125 members should view the picture before its release. The board initially allocated twelve tickets to the NAACP. However, they cut this number to two – with the proviso that only white members of the organisation may attend. Many in attendance that day were friendly to the picture, and their enthusiastic response to it swayed the members of the Board. It’s believed Frederick C. Howe, the Chairman of the Board, wanted the entire second half of the film banned, but, if true, his was a minority voice. The NAACP believed it had won a major victory by having much of the film censored, but the Board met with the film’s producers, who offered to change certain scenes. On 12th March, the General Committee passed the film by a majority of twelve to nine, subject to two minor changes. Attempts to block or censor the film in other cities – notably Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia and Cleveland – met with similar defeat, although some larger local NAACP branches enjoyed limited success.

Upon national release, The Birth of a Nation enjoyed unparalleled success. It also sparked a not-altogether unforeseen revival of the Ku Klux Klan. Federal law enforcement had shut down the Reconstruction-era white supremacist group depicted as heroes in Griffith’s film in the 1870s. William J. Simmons, a former Methodist minister suspended for inefficiency in 1912, received the revived Klan’s charter from the state of Georgia on 4th December 1915. On 6th December 1915, the Atlanta Constitution  announced the film’s arrival in the city and carried an advertisement for the Klan. The organisation described itself as a “high class order for men of intelligence and character.” Simmons and his bedsheet-wearing acolytes paraded in front of the queues awaiting entry to the premiere.

Although the Klan exploited the film to publicise itself, claims that the film was solely responsible for the group’s revival are false. By 1919, it had only a few thousand members; it wasn’t until the organisation hired professional publicity agents in the early 1920s that membership rocketed.

The Birth of a Nation is as divisive now as it was back in 1915. The positive portrayal of the Ku Klux Klan and the depiction of its black characters are grossly offensive to a generation raised in an environment of gender and race equality. Today’s audience finds it almost impossible to understand why it was once so revered. Griffith was raised by a man who fought for the Confederacy and experienced the war’s disastrous aftermath. He genuinely believed he wasn’t racist. He believed Dixon’s racist, inflammatory novel depicted an accurate version of events because they aligned with his own father’s racist perspective. And, incredible as it might seem, most historical works on the Reconstruction at the time would have supported Griffith’s view of its history. That is not to offer an apology for the film’s content, but to put it in context with prevailing attitudes of the time. Griffith’s 1916 release, Intolerance, was an attempt to atone for the offence caused by The Birth of a Nation and to answer those whom Griffith felt had unfairly accused him of racism.

The problem today is that those unable to see beyond its racism cannot appreciate its artistic achievement, while those who choose to ignore its racism dismiss an evil that society must acknowledge if it is to be defeated. It is perhaps easier to consider The Birth of a Nation as a reflection of the times that spawned it: an era when racism was commonplace and often unpunished.

Sources: D. W. Griffith’s Film, The Birth of a Nation: The Film that Transformed America, Michael R. Hurwitz; D. W. Griffith: An American Life, Richard Schickel; Adventures with D. W. Griffith, Karl Brown; D. W. Griffith: American Film Master, Iris Barry; Billy Bitzer; his story, Billy Bitzer; Lillian Gish: the Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me, Lillian Gish; D. W. Griffith: his Life and Work, Robert M. Henderson; A Silent Siren Song: the Aitken Brothers’ Hollywood Odyssey, 1905-1926, Al P. Nelson; D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, Melvyn Stokes; The Birth of a Nation, Paul McEwan.